Trump criticises prisoner swap between Russia and the US, calling it a "victory for Putin"
He said that if he were president, he would have freed the political prisoners without the need to release the killer
The historic prisoner swap on 1 August was a "victory for Putin", Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said during an interview with Fox Business on 2 August.
During the prisoner swap, Russia and Western countries exchanged a total of 24 prisoners, the largest such move in almost 15 years.
Trump claimed that the deal was "very complicated", so it is unclear "how bad the deal is for us".
When asked about his reaction to Russia's release of The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Hershkovich and other prisoners, Trump said that "as always, it was a victory for Putin."
"But we got somebody back, so I'm not going to dispute that," Trump told Fox Business.
Gershkovich was arrested in Yekaterinburg in March 2023 and charged with espionage. The White House called the allegations "ridiculous".
"This would not have happened if we were in power. We would have brought him back, and we wouldn't have had to pay anything for it," Trump said.
"We wouldn't have had to let some of the famous killers go because, as you know, it happened," he added.
Trump is referring to Vadim Krasikov, a murder convict who was released from a German prison as part of the exchange.
In 2021, a German court sentenced Krasikov to life in prison for the murder of Zelimkhan Khangoshvili in 2019. A Georgian citizen of Chechen descent, Khangoshvili fought against Russian forces in Chechnya in the early 2000s and sought asylum in Germany in 2016.
The German court stated that Krasikov had acted on orders from the Kremlin and obtained a fake passport to travel to Berlin to kill Khangoshvili.
At the time, the Kremlin denied the allegations, but on 2 August confirmed that Krasikov was an FSB agent.
Background. As a reminder, the WSJ claims that the prisoner exchange between Russia and the United States was made possible by a secret channel of communication between Biden and Putin.
Instead, the German prosecutor's office said that the decision to exchange Krasikov did not take into account the views of the relatives of the slain Chechen commander, but instead demonstrated "excessive compromise" with Putin.
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